I will be posting images with an explanation allowing time for you to complete each step and reply to your posts. I will be taking questions for each step we go. We will be learning how to make basic models first (eg buildings) then more complex objects as the weeks advance. If you know MAX you can also help me by taking questions.

This tutorial is made up into sections:

1. Face Mash editing. Getting to know the basic tools and panels, Poly /Vertex Mash editing. Forming better shapes like roofs.
2. VU mapping and texturing. Applying textures to your objects the right way. &. Creating the Collisions with surface maps and TXDs.
5. How to get objects in game.
6. Making Complex objects and mapping.
8. MAP-IO and aligning objects in game.

This is the building we made last week. The House -> https://www.dropbox....yg/TheHouse.max. I added a chimney stack on the side for this weeks tutorial. We can get into more complex stuff next week.

How to texture:

Select all the faces of the model by holding and left clicking, moving the mouse diagonally cross the scene to select all the faces.

Now holding the CTRL key down and left clicking each face we can unselect the faces we do not want to texture like windows, doors and roof bits

We can click ignore backfacing to aid in clicking the faces in view and not the faces behide by mistake.

We only want to texture the wall. When we are happy with the selected faces we can move onto the next step, finding the right textures from the texture archive on the desktop. It is best to plan out what textures your going to use so make a folder called house01 and copy the textures you think your going to use into this model, in time when you get used to texturing your be able to harvest them from the textlist folder.

Update: I had made a bit of a discovery that .png is better to texture then .bmp, this can fix the texture corruption issues with models. A texture in TXD workshop that includes an alpha texture like railings. You can use the ConvIM tool -> http://www.mwgfx.co....rams/convim.htm to mass convert them all over to .png.

You can click on this image above and resize it or find the original in the texture archive.

I choose the above image for the walls and by pressing M in 3dsmax, I bring up the Materials editor.

I drag and drop the texture I am after onto the Material editor using up the 1st slot. Where I apply the image to model pressing this paints the faces with the texture.

The texture is now applied to the house model. Next we UV map the texture zooming into a corner of the building like the image below.

Clicking on the Modifier list, Select UVW Map towards the bottom of the list.

On the right new panel click box first, then change the dimension area values to 12x, 12y and 12.

Like this image below.

Once you're happy with the Mapping of [12, 12, 12] in the Length, Width and Height boxes we can set the texture tile offsets [1.0, 1.0, 10] below in the 3 other boxes but looking at the scene the texture placement looks fine so this time we can apply the texture by right clicking UVW Mapping shown in gray above editable mash. Select Collapse To to set.

You could experiment with VU Mapping yourself by undoing the UV map scene and this time try with other numbers in the dimension boxes and offset boxes to get a better idea.

We have done our first UV Map. Now we can do the roof by picking another texture.

I add this texture to the 2nd slot in the material editor and then I apply this to the roof. Select VUW mapping from the Modifier List. and Collapse To to set the texture.

Changing my view point.

Notice the values I put on the right hand side, I wanted to scale the texture currently and at the right rotation by selecting X or Y, Z in the alignment box. When you do the other side of the roof you need to flip the texture using the boxes on the tile offsets section.

We are now going to do windows and doors. this time using the offset tile window in UVW Mapping.

Highlight the door first and click on the modifier list again for UVW mapping.

This time when we apply the image and clicked box we have the whole image. we only need to show half the bitmap, one door not both. Click on the tile offsets and in the U box put -0.5 or 0.5 depending on the side of the door texture you want to show. Right click the UVW Mapping bar and Collapse To. now using the same method as used with the door you can do the windows.

We can also make our own textures by taking pictures of walls or doors, brick walls or edit the existing textures. All textures are best to be kept within 64x64, 128x128, 256x256 or 512x512 pixel sizes. Remember that the bigger you have the textures the slower in game these objects will render.

we are going to change the ws_boxhouse_wins6.bmp as we can do simple things with MS Paint. Load in the window texture and copy the region from one side of the texture and paste it over the other.

->

I saved this new texture under a new file name called wsboxhouse_wins6.bmp as I did not want to overwrite the original file, just apply this new window texture for the larger windows.

I also finished off the piping and guttering around the roof using white and dark colored textures (You can make these), To finish off the building I added some other detail under the windows by making boxes and painting them like that was showing in the last tutorial. Placing the boxes under the windows and attaching them in place and moving the vertices to make them wider to just overlap the window edges.

If we bring everything together from Basic Modelling and Texturing tutorials we end up with the final scene. Remember to always attach all the objects in the scene just before you save for the last time and only before you ready to export to game.

X-Seti

We are going to get this in game using all the tools required to be downloaded on the first page.

First we need to export the model.

Click on the - Hammer icon on the right side of 3dsmax. look for Launch-Bar on the bottom right.. This just runs the scripts panel where we can launch the scripts. The GTA Scripts box. Click on the Blastov (shown in light green) button. This will bring up a longer vertical control panel with lots of useful buttons. Here you can export the DFF (shown in yellow) and COL (shown in blue) using the 2 top buttons, Mass DFF and COL it doesn't matter if there is one model and col to export. Put the dff and col in their own folder called dff-convert.

Follow the menus to convert one or in mass your extracted dff's from 3DSMAX. save this to the dff-convert, mass convert will do this for you. Keep the dff to the side as it is ready to be put the dff into game (almost).

Lets work on the collision now for this you'll need Steve M's COL Editor 2. Start COL ED2 and load in the new col.

Right click the house02 entry and select optimize. You'll be best to do this after each object you have added to the tool. Only the new objects need to be optimized this can be done to one or more files once by selecting them.

You can only optimize type III cols. if your working on VC type I then you need to convert the COL format down to type I after you have optimized your files. Not before!. to convert to COL type 1, right click the house02 entry and find target version and select type I.

We do not really need to do surface types unless we are working on land the player is going to be running, jumping or driving around on, the house02 should be using a default surface type so we can check this.

Click on the Edit Mode button and select faces but bewared there is no undo button what so ever. Save often after every 5 changes if you modifying faces in any way.

Surface types;

Scroll down Edit Mode window till you see ignore backfacing. untick this and right to this is edged faces, tick that. Move down some more till you see surface types and a button with . . . on it.

We want to make sure the object is using default surfaces so tick on this

SA and VC have their own surface types to make sure your col's and using the right type first.

You can select the facing you want to surface like the windows (glass) and the doors (wood)

Remember this for when your doing land next time, like roads - tarmac and grass.

Note: There are engine limits with collision files; The main rule is no file can be bigger then 128Kbs (That's about 1900 faces). The makeup of the collision could be lots of faces with only one surface type or not so many faces used with a lot of surface types used for every face. surface types add 4 bytes per face thus adding data to the overall collision file.

You may need to reduce the amount of faces where possible to get higher quality models in game. This is known as custom culling where you only want to make the collision wall / area around parts of the model you do not want the playing to can access to, in game.

Looking at the house model as have collisions on the bottom of the house where the player would never need to get to unless your creating interiors for buildings places the player is allowed to go inside. so we can select the faces on the bottom and delete these.

Next the exterior walls of the house. We can reduce the faces here to by selecting all the faces up to the roof and replacing these with a box. the image below shows this.

You do not need high quality collisions for your high quality models, you can reduce the faces by making boxes or spears to replace this faces, try the [replace by box] on some of the faces.

Save your work and put the col to the side with the dff file.

The TXD's

We now need to create the TXD file to contain the textures for your building, there are many ways to do this but I'm going to show you the simplest way to harvest them and build the TXD with TXD builder.

Note: Look where I've put a gray underline. Edit; there was something up with my windows partition. fixed now so we can continue on with windows 7.

A new window will appear where we just click [texture list]. save this in the same place as your dff and col.

Now click save to your desktop.

2. Now because Steve's RWA tool does not retain a set path to where your textures are storied we need to change the path in the house02.txt file so we can harvest the textures from your textlist/ folder on the desktop every time we make a TXD.

Open up Notepad++ and load in the house02.txt change where it says from Desktop/ to Desktop/textlist/ with find name and replace option. We can keep this window open if we are doing a lot of model.txt files. All you would need to do is click the replace button and save every time for each file you drag and drop into the editor.

3. Next we open up TXD builder and drag the house02.txt file into the window where we see all the textures from the txt file compiled into a list, Click Build TXD. check the name is house02.txd and...

Click save on that window to save. put the house02.txd with your dff and col. We are almost ready to put this into game.

4. Next we open up TXD workshop with the new house02.txd set the version as VC or SA depending on what your working on from the icon in the right hand bottom corner.

Click on image from the menu and scroll down to compress all images. You do not have to do this for GTAIII

Click on Save TXD and we are done here.

Steps 1 to 4 can be a little repetitive when your working with bigger maps with a lot of objects where we need to create the TXD. you can make your dff objects share textures from a single TXD file that can hold a 64 textures however you can not make the TXD's to big as there are engine and file limits to think about depending on the game engine your working on - VC, LC or SA. Bigger TXD's can lag any engine as the textures take time to be rendered in game we are talking milliseconds but this can all add up. It's heavy not to make your TXD's bigger then 2Mb (Megabytes) in file size.

When you have the dff, txd and col ready for the game we can start to create IDE file entries. his part we need to go into depth on the next tutorial.

Other info for later; on importing map objects.

Things to remember for the next tutorial. and look at the image above.

To import objects you can use Kams script's shown on the right DFF-IO, (I've colored this pick) select bmp but only if you have bmp textures on your desktop otherwise leave this as tga. Click on import and select your model.

To import a map you first need all the textures downloaded from the first page extracted / put these into a folder called textlext on your desktop and all the dff's extracted from the GTA game you want to see the map in 3dsmax. Lets say GTA Vice City, just extract the GTA3.img from the models folder into a folder called VCModels on the desktop using ImgTools.

Next with Map-io set the models folder by selecting the VCModels folder on your desktop. Set .bmp and then the Version VC and SA, find the IPL you want to load from the GTA: Vice City/Data/Maps folders.

Trouble shooting:

Collision never export well from bigger maps using Map-io, this is because Kams does not retain each models pivot coordinates when models are merged, split or newer created.

Examples;

Have a new 3dsmax window open for importing your finished models. you can from that point make the collisions by importing each model.dff and exporting the collision as .3ds by clicking on the File menu and next the export ... option.

A new window will allow you to save the model.3ds file that can be imported into Steve's COL Editor 2 for your new collision with the pivot centered.

Ignore any other options the new window with give you as these are not important to collisions. Just save.

Note; Try to use .png textures and not .bmp because you can also have what's called texture alpha correction where you notice the alpha layer bitmap on your railings model is messed up with another texture. using PNG to import into TXD workshop can fix this.

Urban Legend

I don't believe you were the one writing the sketch up tutorial back in 05 but its great to see tuts like this one X Set I. Just wanted to say thanks. Hopefully I will try this one day. I used to be able to get em in game but they would never be lit correctly...or a number of other things!!! But I'd always be able to start a new game and go check the piece out.

Semih95

Maybe you can show me how to solve this problems. You know I dont have any kid of experience in modelling. Im just trying out and learning with your tutorials

Some other questions

How to open dff and export in dff ? I read so many thinks about scripts but it seems like they doesnt work on 2014 versions or I do something wrong.

One more problem I could solve was the roff. How to make a roff ? Actually I tried it how you described in the tutorial but I dont understand and I just do it myself but I dont want do make he roff look always like in my screenshots above although I liked that.

When I could export the files how can I test it in game ?

And please maka tutorial about how to open a map from SA, how to change something in game and export and test.

X-Seti

Right, I failed to load the 3dsmax building. My 3dsmax is a lot older and isn't supported anymore by 2011+ onwards. I can tell you how to fix your building.

The triangle face that has a part of a window in it highlight this and put in the brick pattern (same as the walls). highlight the same area again but this time go to the modifier list to UVW mapping and set the same numbers you had for the other brick as before set [12, 12, 12] in the Length, Width and Height boxes. it should all match now.

Now with highlight the same on the brick on both sides of the roof and do the same with the modifier list. this should all match the bottom brick area.

As for the roof tile highlight the roof, modifier list this time because the object is round select box (try some other options). this time try out the other tile offset numbers until you start to see that the roof starts to line up. this is a little bit of trail and error to get right.

Semih95

I just made a new skyscraper with no issues and its great but I have some questions. How can I open the SA map in 3ds max ? What do I need. I want to experiment a bit in the country parts and maybe I can change something.

Here is my Willis Tower. I used this http://aehistory.fil...ructure-svg.png and some pictures to model it myself. I worked with the coordinates and calculated some stuff to make it look real. Now I need to texture that stuff

Semih95

I had to make the texture myself cause I couldnt find anything and I dont have any clue how to make that so I just started doing myself just by looking at some pictures. I tried many colors but most of them looked not good and I think this one is the best looking so far but its not finished and I miss some parts

X-Seti

I am amazed, I feel good that someone has followed the tutorials I set out. if only I could get an army of people wanting to learn 3dsmax all the better. I am wondering how we can start a marathon of people modelling.

Ok.. 2 things about your model. These textures are good but what are the pixel dimensions? these need to be in this case 128x512 maybe. because you might have issues getting them into game otherwise and you can fix the top of the building where the window is just overlapping by raising the 4 vertices about 5 - 10 units and reapplying the texture with the same Length, Width and Height values.

Semih95

Thank you very much. I am amazed too about how much you helped me to learn a bit modeling. Maybe you can start a competition ?

First, I just wanted to texture this model without worrying about how to bring that in the game. Maybe I will change the texture a bit. About the window overlapping, I know the problem. I made the building 442 unites high and it should be 432 (108 floors *4 =432) So its a simple mistake I made maybe you can show me how to resize the building to the height I want to ?

Nevermind I just made the two big ones new it was very easy. Now it seems fine

But I want to make it more realistic and these here are missing

I made the texture and I want to use it but I dont know how since I cant apply two textures at once

Here the wireframemodel: I need more fences ( sorry I dont know the name of that) so I can apply the texture to the positions

X-Seti

I would like to use your models m8, the whole point of making tutorials here is the hope someone would follow them and would love to tribute towards a project like this or someone elses.

I would like to keep the tutorials here, but we can link them to the tutorials section. I still have some information to add here and there. I might not be able to do this to where ever there moved to as I've been updating them with the questions asked and questions I have not thought about.